LightStep emerges from stealth with a tool for application performance monitoring

LightStep, a company which has developed a new tool for application performance management, has emerged from stealth with a $29 million dollar war chest.

The company, founded by ex-Google engineer Ben Sigelman, has developed a group of software tools to track the how well applications are working across enterprises.

At Google, Sigelman was responsible for the creation and operation of Dapper, a distributed monitoring system that could analyze 2 billion transactions per second, according to a LightStep statement. Sigelman also was one of the developer behind the OpenTracing standard, part of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation.

The company counts Digital Ocean, Github, Twilio and Yext as customers, and no doubt it’s that early adoption from customers that led to the company attracting the attention of Sequoia, which led the company’s latest, $20 million financing.

LightStep had raised a $7.5 million from investors including Redpoint and its initial seed backers Cowboy Ventures and Harrison Metal.

Founded in 2015, LightStep touts its ability to offer real-time tracking across an organization for transactions that can involve dozens of different services pulled together through application programming interfaces.

The company’s software has a distributed architecture that pulls data through either native integration with the OpenTracing standard created by Sigelman, or other tracing community open source projects; centralized data-logging applications and services; or mesh technologies and load-balancers like Envoy, linkerd, nginx, and haproxy to name a few (according to a statement).

When the company’s statistical engine finds something anomalous to normal operations, it replays and records an end-to-end trace of the data flows. That provides context across the different services that touched the data, so that developers can resolve the incident or find the problem, the company explained.

“Today’s production applications do not come from a single mold,” said Daniel Conde, Analyst, Enterprise Strategy Group, in a statement provided by LightStep. “There will be microservices as well as monolithic applications, and deployments will be on bare metal services and on hybrid cloud platforms. These need to co-exist and integrate with each other, so a modern application performance monitoring solution needs to gather data from across the enterprise with all of these models.”